


the katabasis of tabitha drake

by remnantof



Category: DCU - Comicverse
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon, Archaeology, Canonical Character Death, Depression, Drowning, Gen, Gender Issues, Grief/Mourning, Mental Health Issues, Mouth-to-Mouth, Multi, Other, POV Second Person, Queer Het, Queer Themes, Teen Angst, Trans Character, Trans Male Character, Transitioning, Violence
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-01-04
Updated: 2012-01-04
Packaged: 2017-10-28 22:07:01
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 9,782
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/312664
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/remnantof/pseuds/remnantof
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>pre-52 canon rewrite with tim as an afab male-identified/presenting teen. with established canon pairings, some extra tim/cassie, and possible tim/jaime pre-slash near the end.</p>
            </blockquote>





	the katabasis of tabitha drake

**Author's Note:**

> Warning/Note: trans* themes, IC transmisogyny and sexism, portrayals of anxiety and depression, both related to and concurrent with issues faced by a trans* character; IC misgendering of a trans* character; self-loathing, body dysphoria, mentions of menstruation; survivor’s guilt/grief/suicide ideation, self-destructive behavior; blood, murder/crime scene, extreme emotional trauma, and choking + drowning toward the end.

There aren't many kids your age in the neighborhood where you grow up: there are a lot of retirees, older couples who treat you with a politeness slightly warmer than the kind they extend to your parents. There is a cold interest that isn't good or bad, swilling around the adults in your land behind the gates and guard house. It's crisp, like the leaves the groundskeepers blow away from the gutters, before those spots of color can decompose, layer brown over grey. Your parents tell them about the latest trip, the latest find shipped to you in pale crates made bigger and grander with foam and straw. They leave out the ticks that go from crate to carpet, the stories of curses they shared to catch your interest.

When they leave, the story and the artifact stay behind with you. You can't go down that hall unless the housekeeper is already there, gently dusting the glass cases. Even the urns have eyes and you like them and hate them, you want to touch them, you want to break them. You want to break the glass.

The neighbors eventually ask what you've been up to. You raise yourself out of a slouch at the tug of your mother's hand, shoulders squared under a long red coat and tilting your head back to see through your bangs. They're fond of you but no too much: as a fixture of the neighborhood you are an example of childhood, you are like a picture, or part of a bigger story, not very much in focus. A daughter named after the mother's mother; an amateur ballerina; a charmingly adept but talentless pianist. Parenthood without too much of the fuss. She was such a quiet baby. She's already so pretty.

There's a boy several years older who lives across the street. His coat is just as long as yours but dark blue, and you see him getting in and out of a dark sedan several times a day. There is a December afternoon where both of you are getting into-out of cars at the same time, and he has a scarf--a riot of primary colors twisting around him, bright against navy and grey. "I like your scarf," you call, and he straightens up the way you do when addressed, looking around for who spoke. When you step around the car to let it pull away, he thanks you. It was a gift, from his aunt.

"Where are you going," you ask. "It's too late for school."

"Soccer practice," and he unzips his bag part of the way, so you can see his bright blue jersey and cleats. It's jarring, the sudden sense that you are doing more than looking. That you are absorbing this moment with your eyes, trying to pin it down, make it hold still until you're done with it. You feel that way a lot, but this is intense enough to feel--like it's not normal, like it's not just...seeing. The laces spun just so, a grass stain that just won't bleach out of the white leather. Your slippers aren't even pink, aren't even a real color. They just match your feet and you had to tell your mom the kind with the ribbon itched too much, weren't practical for standing at the bar. "Is there any more room on the team," you hear someone ask. You have to stop looking, stop learning with your eyes, to realize someone was you.

"I don't know," he says, and his mouth twists up. He actually looks like a kid, like a boy, instead of an example, instead of a tiny adult. "Anyway it's not for girls." He zips the bag shut and climbs into the car, like--like he's done with you now. The car lingers, you linger, long enough that the driver backs up, rolls down the window and asks if you're alright, if you're in the right place.

"I guess," you mutter, looking at the frost in the gutter, a leaf that didn't get blown away trapped in it. You want to climb in that window, crawl into the back seat and pull his head around by that scarf. You want to take it. You want to take everything from him.

The car pulls away. You cross the street, go upstairs, and cry in your bath until your housekeeper calls you down to eat with her.

-

Jason Todd isn’t the first boy you like, or the first boy you want to just--be. But he’s the first person you liked who died, and confirmation of something you always knew, something that doesn’t change anything but still feels like someone is _shoving_ you with it. Boys like Jason aren’t any better off than you. Boys like Jason aren’t safe.

You still want to be him. You still follow these boys into the night, squeezing yourself through the gate after dark and climbing into their world. You have adventurous parents, or something like it. They approve the switch from ballet to rock climbing to self-defense as each year moves you closer to independence, or just the ideal age for expressions of it. Controlled expressions. The ones they know about.

You don’t take any classes with the camera. That’s something private, equipment as part of your body as the thin muscles starting to fill out your arms and legs. They’re not as big as his and they never will be, but there’s an ache in wanting that you just can’t leave alone. You _want_ to fill out a red and gold suit the way he did, move the way he did and crack your voice on new depths. The way his did when he caught you on a fire escape, running down to get a shot of them in an alley, that same alley. When he went for the camera you faked a knee to his jock and elbowed him in the face, by chance more than skill. He’d pinned you to the wall with one hand on your arm, the other holding his nose, mulish and red in the face, red on his face. “You fight like a--” and you both knew what he was going to say, but for once, no one said it.

His eyes got wide and he looked at your small hands clutching the camera that hung around your neck. At the insufferable competence in your glare and you could feel the hair coming unpinned under your cap, starting to spill at the edges. The ambiguity of a child’s body in a thick sweater is still just that: ambiguity, a lack of confirmation, clarity. That made it so clear, you weren’t what you were trying to be.

“Nevermind,” he said, flushing and brushing invisible dust from your arm. The part of you wound up to hit him again got stuck in your throat, but you weren’t going to cry. You’re not going to cry over a boy ever again, except all those times you did, and will, pretty much always. “You should go home. You’re probably the only kid still out here who has one.”

That made you flush. There was no ambiguity about that, with the camera around your neck, your latest pair of boots bumping against his, black to green. But the meaning of the word stands up for debate, when the night is where they are, when the house is empty and full of things that feel stolen, from the dead, or killed in their own way on the trip overseas. Specimens on display. Outside of that place, you are a living breathing running _creature_. No one is polite to you out here, no one cares who or what is under the sweater, if they notice you at all. There is no role to play but the observer, the detective. There is no recital, there is no shopping, books about horses, living horses, ballet slippers, bright scarves.

There’s no bright anything, anymore. Robin is dead, and you cry anyway, you cry again. Until the housekeeper gets your parents on the phone, and you try to explain without telling them a thing. A boy is dead, mom. A boy I liked is dead and the funeral is tomorrow.

They’ll try to make it. They promise to make it. They don’t, but that isn’t what disappoints you. It’s the lack of questions. No one wants to know where you met Jason Todd-Wayne, why you liked him, how long. If anything happened, where you were when it happened, what happened. What _really_ happened.

The grave marker is intimidating, and not the way Jason struck you as. It’s too big, it’s too--there’s something wrong with the stone, with it even being made of stone. You don’t want to look at this. You don’t want to take this scene in and remember it, the way you remember everything. Like the way things appear can be so important, the movement of crowds or birds, the reflection of weak Gotham light on the buildings, spots of color in an otherwise colorless place. Jason’s marker stands like another barrier between you and the squirming, shifting mess of everything you want, at any given moment and in general. Nobody can get to him and he can’t get out. You don’t know what it’s supposed to be, if it’s supposed to be anything, but that’s what it says when you stare at it, standing close to your dad under an umbrella in the rain that is always falling or ready to fall, this close to water.

Jack tells you to reach into his pocket. Your shaking hand pulls out several coins from his collection, tokens from graves much grander and heavier than this, so heavy they sunk into the earth and disappeared for centuries. “Go ahead,” he says gently, bringing the umbrella with you to get closer, set them at that angel’s feet. She has none of the grace her illustrated sisters possess, being made of stone. You change your mind about her. You want to throw your arms around her heavy skirts and cry into them the way you can’t when your mother is around. When anyone is around, really. “I’m sorry,” you say, with no further explanation, because your father is standing with his arm around your shoulders and you’re sorry that he’s here. You’re sorry that the coins are from him, that they have nothing to do with you, that you’re kind of leaving them just to get them away from you.

“It’s going to be alright, Tabby.” He gives you a squeeze.

It’s kind of a lot, from them, and it’s about ten years too late. You’re thirteen and nauseous and Jason is fifteen and dead. You have hundreds of carefully catalogued and protected pictures of him on your hardrive, and he has three coins that will probably disappear by morning. All you can think about is the funerals you didn’t get to go to and the man who did, and the cursed objects in your house, glass cases, Charon’s obol in three like you’re trying to catch up with something you didn’t know you’d started. “No, it’s not,” you tell him, shaking away the weight of his arm, walking back to the car in the rain.

You never heard of a girl going into the land of the dead to guide a boy back up anyway.

-

The first boy you liked frequents an apartment in New York that you’re embarrassed and grateful to know about. This is urgent enough to do in daylight, and you didn’t know what to change out of your uniform into, what to do with yourself. Your hair is pulled back in a ponytail and your skinny legs stick out from your shorts, sporting the patches of darker hair everyone is starting to notice, the girls at school telling you you should ask your mom for a razor, the boys just laughing at the view, their legs looking even worse.

You don’t care. You _don’t care_.

Kory Anders answers the door in a towel, gives you a once-over and you shrink back against the wall, caring enough that you want to burst into tears and flee. This is too important, though, this is bigger than your dignity or, well, a million foot tall alien supermodel. “Hello,” she says, her voice pitched to an unearthly tone between a purr and birdsong, a smile spreading clear across her face. Her lips are copper like the crayon, a dull shine, and her teeth slightly pointed. You have to remember to breathe, flushed down to your collar and feeling more weak than afraid. “May I assist you?” She beams even wider, if possible, licking the edge of her teeth with a look of--pride, maybe.

“Is--is Dick Grayson here,” you ask, checking to be sure the photograph is still safe in the pocket of your school blazer. You told the driver you were dropping some film off here to be developed by a colleague, because a friend with an apartment in Brooklyn would be strange, but a thirteen year old photographer having a colleague to visit before her tae kwon do lesson is just fine, makes perfect sense.

You probably didn’t even need to make an excuse. You tell them where you want to go, you ask them to wait, they take you home when you’re done. Your parents are gone too many weeks at a time to leave detailed instructions for your free time.

It’s fine, it’s easier that way. “I really need to speak with him.”

Kory’s face falls, tugging your heart with it. The first girl--woman--you like is sorry to tell you that he isn’t, truly sorry, filling a doorway with her body and sincerity in a way you don’t think you ever will. Leaning out into the hall, she holds her towel just-closed with one hand and puts the other on your shoulder, like she’s pulling you into a secret. Like she knows why your eyes aren’t quite reaching her face while you slow-blink and stiffen into the half-embrace, and she doesn’t mind. “He is up-state right now? With the circus. If you wait right here, I can give you an address. Oh, or a number for the phone!”

She pulls away, drifting back into the apartment and leaving you at the door. The towel is tossed aside just before she shifts out of view, feet not quite touching the ground. You look away, even though her hair streams after her, not leaving much to see. You haven’t stopped blushing since she opened the door, and your mouth feels dry, your heart is pounding. This is a distraction, you’re not going to forget why you’re here, or stay a moment longer than you need to. When she turns the corner again, she’s wearing a long robe and walking, bare feet tapping the floor as she hurries back to press a slip of paper into your palm. “Good luck,” she tells you, her whole self radiant with her smile, and her hand presses to linger at your cheek until it’s too much. Until you pull away with muttered thanks and run back to the stairs.

-

Dick Grayson isn’t very happy to see you, less so when he finds out why, but after a few minutes the feeling is pretty mutual. You didn’t dare talk to him on the phone, though you dialed once to be sure of the writing in your hand, to hear his voice that you really don’t remember, he was your age when you met and he’s in his twenties now--but there is relief when the circus manager promises to get him and eventually, someone else picks up, says hello quickly, lightly.

Face to face, he is the dark to Kory’s supernova-light, and it seems a surface-only observation at first. But any mention of his family, and his mood becomes a mercurial fit. He stops moving casually, effortlessly around the animal cages and becomes awkward, then aggressive. He paces, folds and unfolds his arms, puts his hands in his pockets, pulls them out. That reminds you, you find the picture in your bag and show it to him, but pictures don’t work for other people the way they work for you, most of the time. It doesn’t mean anything to him, to see his face from that long ago, to see some three year old girl in his lap that he has somehow cajoled into a smile. It requires an explanation you don’t want to give, because the point, the point is--

“Batman is going to kill someone if you don’t go back, he _needs_ a partner--”

“What do you know about it, you shouldn’t even be involved,” he harshes, voice pitching roughly through a stage whisper. “You’re just a girl.”

“SHUT UP,” someone yells, an ugly voice you do and don’t recognize. You were out there, every night for the last four years, every night since you figured it out. You went to the grave and you left your dad’s coins. And when you do sleep, somewhere between the darkest part of the night and sunrise, you watch his parents fall again, and again, again. You know enough, you are involved.

You’re not just a girl. “I follow him more nights than I don’t, and he doesn’t even notice.” Something wet and heavy wavers in your voice. It’s a testament, to how far gone he is but also how _good_ you are. “It’s different now. He thinks he’s alone again, there’s nobody--it doesn’t _matter_ now. He just hurts people, there isn’t any--

“There isn’t any _justice_.” You don’t know why you pick that word, except the truth of it. What it means to Dick isn’t for you to know. What it means to you--if there was justice in the world, Jason wouldn’t be dead, or someone else would be, or you would be. You wouldn’t be like _this_. You wouldn’t even be here, like he said. You would just be a girl, and know nothing, and not be involved. “He needs _Robin_.”

“That isn’t me anymore, kid.”

The sad part is, you can tell. You watch him pace and kick the dirt, cross his arms and sulk, and you believe him. The boy in the photo means nothing now. The boy who coaxed you onto his leg, balanced you there with a laugh because you were so small, you barely weighed a thing--he isn’t here. You don’t know why you thought you could find him, even after ten years of searching. Especially after ten years of searching. Biting your lip, you can feel heat press and prick your eyes, making you blink too fast. Making him look at you with something like horror. “I’m sorry, I just--you’re asking a lot and it’s all really sudden--”

This is not what you expected or wanted, and you turn your face away abruptly, angry with him, but not so angry that you can say no when he holds out his hand, when he says, “There’s someone you need to meet.”

-

You have to fight Bruce every step of the way. You surprise yourself with it, with how much you want what Dick offers, what Bruce tries to withhold. “She’s a casualty waiting to happen,” he tells one of the portraits on the wall, after Dick has been and gone, after you’ve spilled all their secrets, shown off everything you know. It makes you want to scream, so you do. This is Batman, this is someone walking an edge and Jason is dead and this is also Bruce, this is a person who misses Jason, as much as Batman misses Robin. Your legs are shorter and thinner but you know how to aim high, kicking over the end table to get his attention. Throwing a framed picture off the coffee table so it shatters against the wall. He turns without an expression, with a blank stare, like you’re not even a person in his house. Like you’re not even breathing, much less breathing as hard and deep as you are, like you can assault him with a feeling, with everything you never exercise at home, and it will _do_ something.

“ _She_ can die, then.” He just keeps staring, then stops, drifting his attention back to the painting. You pull a lamp down to the floor, knock figurines from the mantle, wanting his attention and wanting him to  
 _understand_. No one ever gets it right, God or maybe the universe couldn’t even get it right, and what is he going to do? You are not a casualty yet and you know enough, too much.

You’re. You’re smarter than this. You didn’t get here by being angry, by doing something rash. You can’t remind him of Jason by tearing the room apart, by not being afraid of him, because you are. You are more afraid of him than anything else you can think of, you always have been, but you’re a different kind of angry than Jason was. You’re angry for a different reason, you’re angry in a different context and you are never going to fill his suit properly.

Bruce is standing at the painting still, his hands clasped behind his back, his eyes closed. There’s a depth of feeling in it that captivates and repulses you. What you know about grief is still fairly secondhand, still dramatized and absorbed the way everything else is, everything you see meaning more than it does to everyone else. Everything hits you harder, deeper, but maybe not this. Jason was a boy you liked--Jason was his partner, his son. Suddenly tired--suddenly as heavy as if you _had_ taken on Jason’s muscle, his weight--you sink down to the carpet on shaking legs. You’re dizzy, you’re still breathing too hard. You started the day on a bus full of strangers, took it to a circus, let a man put you on the back of his motorcycle and drive you to a manor. You shouted at a man and broke expensive things. You’re thirteen and you have no idea how you’re going to get home, if you’re going to get home.

He’s kneeling beside you on the floor, holding out a monogrammed kerchief--T. W., his father’s--and telling you to breathe. “I’m scared and I don’t know what to do,” you admit, and maybe that is what let Jason in, maybe that is why he scooped Dick up off the center ring and took him home, because he stares at you with that immeasurable look until you think that’s all he will ever do, but then he just says _good_ , walks over to the grandfather clock he was standing in front of, and pulls it out to reveal a dark entry and set of stairs.

-

He asks for your name and you give it, but a silence follows, he waits until you understand that wasn’t the question. He’s Batman, of course he knows one Tabitha Marie Drake is standing in his cave, eying a suit that has been carefully preserved behind glass.

You asked your father once, what they wanted to name you if you’d been a boy. His smile had been fond and he’d looked away, the way people do when they think about the past. Your mother named you after her mother and aunt; he would have named you after his father and himself. “Timothy,” you tell Bruce, then: “Tim.”

“When you fight,” he tells you during training, when he is watching, noting, assessing, “Some of your opponents, depending on their training, will understand the way you move for what it is.”

“And what’s that,” you snap, head dropping defensively. Your knuckles flash, white tape reflecting low lights, against the bag.

“Hesitant, before. Better, now.”

When you look up, there’s a sense to the placidity of his face, that he might be smiling. You imagine that face at the center of the bag, and aim your fist.

-

When your mother dies, you cut your hair. She’s dead and your father sleeps, maybe forever, so there’s no one to tell you where to stop. The clippers hum all the way through your skull and your scalp tingles in their wake, the air on it, the buzz. Before you went to the barber, you let the housekeeper pull the bulk of it into a thick braid, secured it at both ends, and cut it off yourself. For the satisfaction, for the sake of getting this over with, to prove how much you want it. No one ever takes what you want seriously, they ask too many questions, they try to convince you to want something else. Even with the braid in your pocket, they say you would look cute with a bob, with a messy pixie cut. You could look so chic, you could look so sweet.

You could throw up on the pile of hair under the seat and shatter the mirror and cut off your ear to mail to--someone, anyone. You don’t know what they want. You don’t know what extreme you have to go to, to make people understand, to impress the fucking sincerity of this onto the world. All you have is your father’s credit card and those clippers. A number one on the back and sides. Leave an inch on the top.

You look like an army brat, or a cancer patient, or just the word everyone is thinking or going to think: dyke. You look ten years old. But you don’t look like a Tabitha Marie, and right now, that’s enough.

At the funeral, you wear a dark sweatshirt and jeans, with the hood pulled up like a half-hearted attempt at respect. No one is buying it, but no one has anything to say. There is nothing to say. You throw the braid onto her lowered casket instead of your handful of dirt, and that’s it. That is the end of something, as if you have finally paid for it. Thrown yourself into the grave like a dutiful, loving daughter and gone with her, or at least, you threw in as much of yourself as you could, as you figure she’d earned. It’s probably the ugliest thought you’ve ever had, but that is you now. You have those. Ugly thoughts and and an ugly hairy body, ugly cycling through you and leaking out every month. Ugly lumps on your chest that you have to tape down to fit into the suit, ugly spots on your face and now an ugly haircut to match.

Ugly is working for you right now. Ugly is the best you can do.

-

The thing about being Robin is, with your hair cut short and your mask in place, no one has to know. When Superboy visits Gotham for the first time, he makes assumptions and you don’t correct him, and you keep on not correcting them until you’re hanging out in a cave and Bart is vandalizing the walls at top speed, and you’re almost ready to hang up a no-girls-allowed sign when the other teens start to show up, but.

But Cassie keeps tripping over herself, and the wig is painfully obvious to any trained eye, and your stomach flips so hard at the sight of her that you tell Kon to _can it_ and give everyone, girls included, a ride home in the Super-Cycle. You fight crime together and go camping, and you don’t envy the way the girls retire to their own tent and stay up the second half the night giggling, almost shrieking at each other’s stories, you _don’t_ , because you finally have a group of friends, and they call you Robin or Rob for short, and Kon is never any the wiser when he shoves you over to get in your sleeping bag. When he farts on purpose and laughs and you don’t, and you both stay in spite of the smell, talking about life with glass walls, and girls, and when he finally notices the holes where your ears were pierced this whole time, he just wants to get matching s-shield stubs to cement the depth of your friendship and the size of his ego.

If they ever think it’s weird that you never change with either group, that your female disguises are eerily convincing and there might be a reason Cassie looks at you the way she sometimes looks at Cissie, or Anita--no one ever says anything to you about it.

-

Stephanie Brown is not the first girl you like, or the first person you like who dies. The change you scatter at her grave is a joke you never manage to find very funny, even if you almost laugh at the time. If tossing the braid of hair into your mother’s grave felt like paying for something, well, that was the real joke. You are never going to be done paying. You are never going to stop owing the universe something, you just wish you knew what you were paying for. What you did that was so terrible or got that was so great.

Maybe it doesn’t even work that way. Maybe this is Gotham, and you are paying for someone else, you are paying for the fact that your father walks again. You were born all wrong and you are hemhorraging all the things you are stupid enough to look at too much, to want, so he could wheel away from a vegetative state, get out of his chair, and settle down with someone new. Because that is how life works. There are people who know themselves and walk away from tragedy with the pieces of their life so clearly defined that starting over is kind of easy. He has a house and a kid and once Dana starts cooking for you both and he’s working again, his life is back on track.

You kind of fucking hate everything but you are sixteen and that’s the most normal thing about you. That is the track for your life and the train that stays on course, through the years that are a blur of red and gold and purple, an ugly suit and an ugly smile, dashes of green, black at every edge, gritty textures, blood on the ground, blood in your mouth, blood in your jock. Telling your first girlfriend you believed in saving yourself for marriage so she wouldn’t fucking touch you, and not knowing what to do when she cried, wanting to kill the guy who touched her, hating them all, hating yourself. Not even giving your second girlfriend an excuse, just saying no, until she was barely your girlfriend, until she’s barely anything, and her marker is so small, and these coins aren’t worth a fraction of what you owe her. “Steph,” you squeak, rubbing your arms, feeling exactly as weak as you are. “I’m so stupid, I should have just trusted you. We should have trusted you. And the worst part about feeling this terrible right now is how you’re not here, because I really want to talk to you about it. You would have been the best person to tell.”

When you sit with your back to the headstone and fold yourself up to cry, it kind of feels like going through the motions. You aren’t just running out of coins, you are running out of creative ways to react to all the overwhelming, now underwhelming, grief. You already ran away to the circus and learned to maim people with your bare hands. You already shaved your head and started pretending to be someone else. Your pocket change and crying is all you have on hand for this. It should be more. It should always be more, you just aren’t sure what the universe _wants_ from you.

It would have been nice, actually, if you were just some cosmic fuckup for the sake of your dad’s cheating death. You could live with the stories being true, with everything he sold to pay off the hospital bills being cursed and your working it off to keep him around. At least you would have some way to keep him around. Or, at the very least, this would not be your fault. This would be his own fault for robbing graves and pinning something real under glass like ghosts don’t exist, like bad things can’t cross running water.

Harkness was set up across the river and you are going to get up and you are going to find that apartment and you are going to rip the wiring from the walls until you _understand_ this. Just as soon as you get your armor back on, just as soon as you can stop staring at the blood and it just goes back into your dad and he wakes up. Shit you’re in your binder and boxers and socks, but no, that’s fine, he already knew about that and things were starting to be okay, he was proud of you and he loved you and he said it, he called you _son_ over the phone--

“DON’T TOUCH ME,” someone howls, and Bruce stops touching you, stops trying to get you under the arms and pull you out of the puddle. You are not contaminating a crime scene, you are setting it up just the way it should be. You are red-handed red-kneed red-everything-ed in the middle of it, because you knew this could happen and you didn’t stay, you didn’t get back in time and now there are two corpses for the price of one. For the price of you don’t know what, you will never know what, and Bruce starts trying to move you again because you are pawing at Jack’s body and asking what do you want, over and over. You didn’t think you could cry for anyone else but you are crying so hard you can’t see, can barely breathe, but you’re getting enough air to ask him questions like the dead will sit up and speak. Like his blood will write answers for you. What do you want what do you want what did I do oh God what did I do _what do I do._

Bruce picks you up like you don’t weigh a thing, and in the scheme of things you probably don’t. The armor keeps you anchored and solid and without it you can’t believe you ever thought you measured up to the price of anything, much less a man’s life, anyone’s life. Your socks and part of your boxers are soaked in a way that is as humiliating as it is horrifying, but he wraps you in one arm and part of the cape, picking up your discarded suit on the way out. Your bones hurt against the kevlar and plastic on his chest and the world is thick from crying. You hit the stupid bat in the middle of it and ask him what you just said, but that was awhile ago, that was before the sirens got so close. “Just put me down, just put me down, I don’t care anymore, I don’t care if they see I don’t care if anyone sees. I wish I was dead I wish it was me, oh God, oh fuck, put me down Bruce put me down--”

“No, Tim.” You don’t know if it’s the way he says no, the weight of it and how he doesn’t have any new ways to deal with this either, though you are trying to make a few up on the fly, or the fact that he used the right name or the fact that he has _always_ used the right name, but you cry and hit him harder and hug him around the neck, bite the side of his cowl and scream right over his ear. This is a good thing, somehow, or either way it doesn’t move him. Your father is dead. Your father is dead, you are on the roof while the police break into your apartment and you are throwing the weight of your grief at an immovable object in the form of a full-blown tantrum.

Bruce puts you down, tries and fails to calmly wrestle you back into the suit, tosses it into an air duct before the police make their way up to the source of all the noise. “The victim’s daughter,” he growls, and you hate him, you hate him so much. This isn’t even new, this anger isn’t even to do with the grief because you have always been this angry, you have always been so angry, no one will ever understand how much, but everything is splintering and the pieces of you go everywhere when he keeps going, when he says “I found her in the apartment, brought her up here until her safety could be ascertained.”

“Go fuck yourself,” you sob. The deputy’s eyebrows raise, and he hovers awkwardly at your shoulder when Bruce finally leaves you to curl in on yourself and process this in something resembling peace.

Robin disappears for a month. You don’t return his calls for a lot longer.

-

It’s a long month. During the day you lay in a bed in an apartment he bought for surveillance. You undress in the dark so you don’t have to see yourself and sleep and sleep and wake up to the stink of your own body, and you look at it with your hands. Your body kind of scares you, but it’s on a long list of things. No matter what you eat or don’t eat, strengthen or atrophy, there are parts that still fill out and soften. Nothing is soft in Gotham. Not even the angels. Not even this bed. It bruises you in your sleep, and you test them with your fingers. Touch the jut of your hips and sweep your palm over the dent between, the bowl carved out and filled back in with muscle. You cup the mound between your legs through your boxers, helplessly, ineffectually. It doesn’t excite or sooth, it just is: hair poking against the fabric, fingers fitting to the contours that aren’t right, but you can’t call them wrong either. They’ve been there your whole life.

You lay there, digging your fingers in until it hurts, loosening, digging, loosening, again. The sun goes down. You don’t get off, you’re not even wet: it’s more like sucking your thumb or picking at a scab than that.

In the shower you wash up with your eyes closed and rub soap everywhere on your body but your chest. That part is definitely wrong. You catch sight of them in the mirror, pulling your binder up from your feet. It could be worse. They could be even bigger, more fat than muscle. They could be harder to hide. They’re still the worst part of everything, you think, because it’s the part you think about the most. You can go for hours, almost days without picking at this part of yourself, questioning it, acknowledging it, until you see your breasts, or feel them under your hand, or notice someone looking at them. Notice someone looking _for_ them. You don’t care if the binder restricts movement and breathing, you don’t care how Bruce feels about you wearing it during training, because Bruce will never know what this is like. How it feels to walk onto a cold street and walk with your arms crossed over your chest, feeling sick at just the possibility of your nipples showing through your shirt, at someone seeing that.

It’s always chilly in Gotham. You layer your clothing over the binder like it isn’t even there, check yourself in the mirror, and, satisfied, go back to not thinking about it.

Instead of patrol, you pull on jeans and a sweatshirt, trim the hair out of your eyes and walk a few blocks to the park. You still don’t understand your relationship with Isley, but she isn’t around lately any way. It’s kind of a shame, you’ve come to like what she did with the place. It’s quiet now, vines spilling over the walls, a padlock and chain hanging broken at the gate. They’ve burned a path for the first hundred yards, and you walk down it with your hands stuffed in your pockets, breathing steam into the dark and letting the night run its fingers up and down your back, tickling your brainstem. It used to be humid here, hotter and wetter than the rest of the city. Now it’s crisp, leaves on the ground and only a thin top layer remaining on the trees. When you look up the sky is fog-filtered teal, cut apart by black branches. If you keep looking, you can pick out a few stars. The drive to the manor takes you out of the city, onto long New England roads grown over like a tunnel of trees. Sometimes you take the bike and just head south and west, head for the mountains and play chicken with the curves, green-red-gold or just bare trunks reaching out of the rock face and moss to catch the sun.

This is everything and nothing like that. The park at night feels like an aquarium when you walk down the path, and you step across that barrier into the water. You look up and try to get yourself lost in a forest that has walls on every side, that doesn’t move and breathe and slither like it used to. The trees don’t try to stab you now, so you run your hand against their trunks, feel them charred or cold and every one of them stiff, strong, unyielding. When you find a clearing you stop, take hold of the pair of coins you found in your father’s desk and squeeze them in your pocket. You want to bury them in the ground here. You want to hand them over to someone and disappear. Sometimes you just tilt your head up, close your eyes and wait for something to happen. Wait for someone to come out of the dark, one more terrible thing to end all the terrible things, get it over with.

Nothing happens. Night after night. You don’t lose your way and you don’t meet anyone under the trees, ash on your palms and coins digging between your fingers.

-

You don’t want to tell them, but that’s not how the Titans work. You’ve missed too many meetings to shrug it off, even if that’s the first thing you do. Good old Robin reticence, a Sarcastic sneer when Cassie folds her arms and gives you a Look. Her arms tighten, but she waits, and the news comes out later and they press in on you with their sympathy and affection while you cry through the glue on your mask.

Cassie finds you later in your room, as you’re changing, down to the binder and jeans and picking out a shirt to wear on your way out, probably to find her. When you open the door without bothering, she gets her first look at it, closes her eyes, and steps inside while taking a deep breath. “I always kind of knew,” she admits.

“No, you didn’t.”

A snort, a laugh. She rubs at her eyes. “No, I didn’t.” She kisses you and you think about all the girls she has kissed, all the discomfited looks she has spared you over the years. You think about why this is all wrong, why showing her was a bad idea, and then you think _go fuck yourself_ and start to cry and open your mouth to slide your tongue against hers, because it has been so long since you did that with anyone, and you love her and you have always loved her.

Over time, maybe you will prove to love each other most when someone you care about is dead, but you won’t know what’s wrong with that. There are things that work and things that don’t, and there are things that are necessary and things that aren’t, and there are things that just are, just be is am are was were, can could _should_ , and this is one of those. She doesn’t know what you want and you don’t know what you want, what you can stand to have with this body, but it’s okay, it’s okay Tim, shhh, and she takes care of you the way she knows how, with her tongue raking and soothing and pressing just inside, with her too-strong hands clutching the join of your thighs to your hips. You shudder and hiccup, bump her head away with a roll of your hips and push her against the door, fuck her with your fingers that are and are not a substitute for anything, held down by your hips and she wraps her legs around you because whatever you are, you’re strong enough to hold her through this.

Later, you curl up around her from behind in the bed, adjusting until your head doesn’t pull any of her hair. You don’t ask anything stupid like, what about Kon, because this isn’t about him yet, you don’t think this is going to be a _thing_. Nothing is soft in Gotham, but you’re clear across the country and her hair tickles your mouth, her breasts are just as much fat as muscle when you cup them and rock together until you stop _needing_ to.

Whatever happens, Cassie will be there, Cassie will be constant, even if you can’t.

-

You talk to Bruce, stop talking to Bruce. Talk to Dick, stop talking to Dick. Move into the manor and back out, never quite able to make up your mind. You love them and you hate them; you’re cursed and you don’t want to hurt them, they’re so fucking dense that you don’t care; they are your family and you can’t stay with them because you can’t live without them, either.

Somewhere in the middle of it, Jason comes back from the dead without your help, calls you a pretender, and beats the shit out of you. This is so incredibly not your year.

-

Slade Wilson has a thing for Robins that runs somewhat perpendicular to Kory’s. As disappointed as he is in the new generation of Titans, maybe it’s his daughter or maybe it’s the black and yellow R on your chest, but he still takes the time to blow out a series of buildings on the West coast and pin you to the skeleton of one by the throat, too strong for the choke-guard in your cape for it to do anything but help him choke you. He’s pressing his weight to your chest to hold you up and push the air you have already back out, and it hurts--it’s a little too soon after your surgery to be out here, but you’re loathe to just leave Cassie _hanging_ with all the new recruits, and--

A steel girder swipes Slade off you just as he’s leaning in to whisper his parting speech, Cassie’s face twisted in a snarl. Rose wolf-whistles, which could mean she’s dealing with this really well or really horribly, but you’re catching your breath and looking across the street at the man-made lake, its fountains off, in the middle of the ravaged plaza. Something is bobbing in and out of the water, a silent face lifting glassy-eyed to almost bite at the air before it goes back under.

“TI--” someone cuts off your name, chokes and yells NO instead, telling you to wait as you do the exact opposite, still coughing to clear your airways as you run across the halted traffic and dive. By the time you reach the bobbing head, it’s disappeared under the water, bubbles sitting on the surface. You take as deep a breath as you can manage, chest aching inside and out, and go down. The water isn’t more than a dozen feet deep, and wreckage from the blasts has brought the bottom even closer. It’s murky but there’s enough light cutting through the surface to make out the silhouette, get close enough to make out the face that is close-eyed and placid. They’re stuck on something and not breathing, you pull the breather from your belt and fix it over their face first, secure it to their mouth and press the catch, forcing a blast of air in that shakes something loose, makes the head roll but they’re far from safe yet.

Your chest burns. The water is finding its way into your suit and soaking your underclothes, weighting you and chafing fresh scars. There’s more panic than heroism in the way you swim down instead of up, following the length of a leg to where the foot is resting under a pipe, anchoring the body down. It takes the rest of your air to push them sideways, unwedge the foot and press up underneath to send them up, and you’re reaching for the second breather when their foot connects with the side of your head, shocking you open and gasping. From the bottom, it’s almost like being in the park, looking up through the trees at the evening sky, except something is happening and you don’t want to close your eyes this time, you want to go back up, get out of this place and _breathe_ again.

A shadow joins the other at the surface, breaks it. The shadow gets closer and it’s black and blue on blue, orange eyes in the dark and hands that you fight, still panicking. You need to swim up and they’re in your way, hands on your shoulders and it’s--it’s Jaime, trying to yell at you underwater as he drags you out and everything tunnels to black.

-

Between tunneling into the dark and coming out of it, between the point where you stop breathing and start again, you wake up. The ground is hard, the dark twists and fractures away from you--fractals, branches, the topmost leaves--into foggy blue. They sway in a wind you can’t hear, no sound but the groaning of stressed wood. It’s cold, but you idly note that your breathe doesn’t steam the air.

Right. You’re not breathing.

Getting up hurts. Your arms and chest ache, and the cold, thin air is harder to move through than you expect. You feel weighted down, pressed on, and just rolling up to a sitting position is a struggle. Standing requires support from one of the trees, which feel surprisingly smooth and hard to the touch, not like wood at all.

Walking produces no sound. No snapping twigs, no crushed or rustled ferns and grass. Just hard earth under your boots. It should strike you as oppressive, the blue fog should hang heavier and the trees could easily claw the background like a threat, but it just--is. It’s hard to move, but why do you want to? You can lay back down, you can stare up at the sky and enjoy the quiet. You thought you hated it growing up, but it wasn’t true. You just didn’t have enough noise to compare it to, to appreciate it.

You stop, swaying and latching onto another tree. It isn’t quite a sound, but your head hurts for a second, some other sense, maybe just a memory, leaves an impression of loud, chaotic noise. Sirens and horns, a blast and long rumble, and shouting. Someone shouting at you.

It passes. You keep moving, slow and silent, until the ground slopes into a glossy ribbon of running water. It doesn’t quite reflect the light, and doesn’t make a sound, but you stop at it. This part, out of everything, disturbs you. You can see the treeline continuing, but the ground is too dark to make out the other side, to see if this is a stream or a river, if the glossy ribbon turns to rapids or falls at either end. You wouldn’t know until it was too late, with no sound to warn you. There’s something about the water--water at all--that you don’t want to explore. It’s as black as the earth and there is no telling how deep it goes.

Walking along its edge is more like crawling. Your body gets heavier and heavier, leans to the side, dragging your footsteps toward the water. You get down on your knees to keep from falling in, until even this is too much. When you sink to the ground, your arm hangs off the edge, into the water, and even in the cold of the forest, its chill shocks you.

The shock might be literal, actually.

Your eyes open, but they were already open. It’s like another pair of eyes, it’s like--the blue fog is painted on your eyelids, and you’re blinking. Night to day, dark to light. There’s the shadow from before, and another, there are your friend’s faces, blocking the sun. When you close your eyes, go back to the quiet, to your arm going numb and everything that will follow, they’re still there. Cassie leans over your body and presses down with both hands, sharp, hard pushes, too hard, it feels like you’re going to throw up--and Jaime is leaning over your head, tapping the side of your face with his fingers and asking you to speak, but you can’t speak, there’s no sound here and your throat is so full--

Cassie stops. Jaime thumbs the side of your mouth and leans closer, seals his over it and breathes. It tickles the edge of the lump in your throat, but doesn’t move it. Cassie is counting and tells him when to stop, starts the count again when she presses down. She pushes one way and he pushes the other, switching off, until the tickle makes your throat itch and move, until the sun is shining behind them again and your arm is fine, flopping up to touch your face as you cough like you’re never going to stop. Jaime helps you sit up and turn over, and then they give you some space, just Cassie’s hand rubbing and hitting your back to get it all out. Jaime is calling you an idiot and an asshole in both languages, his face barely covered, right out in the street, but you can’t find the time or energy to speak and he’s _crying_. This guy who barely associates himself with your team and when he does, mostly teases you into full blown shouting matches by Friday evening. This guy you were telling to shut the fuck up when the alarm sounded, because every fight turns into how tiny you are, how funny it is when you’re mad.

He’s staring at you and crying, everyone is crying, and when you finally stop retching and he tries to hand you your tunic, you start to cry too. Of course they had to take it off. Of course Cassie’s hand has been rubbing circles on your naked back this whole time, and you didn’t notice because that isn’t completely _strange_.

She’s usually the only person who sees this, is all. Taking the tunic in both hands, you pull it to your chest, where there isn’t anything anymore, just a few more scars seeking each other out across your skin, and curl around it anyway. “I’m sorry,” you try to say, but it’s just a croak, it’s just a groan through the silence of their realizing. Your new team, your new friends, and they didn’t know. They were never going to know.

Cassie hugs you from behind and tells you it’s okay, that Slade is gone and they’ll handle the cleanup, that this doesn’t change anything. Cassie says the things you expect her to say, want to contradict because this has to change everything--but she helps you back into your tunic and tells you you’re benched until she sees a doctor’s note, makes you laugh and start choking all over again, and passes you to Jaime. “Take him to the infirmary and strap him to the bed if you have to,” she says, the no-nonsense voice she learned more from whipping your team into shape than any example you ever set. He sniffs hard and nods, armor sliding back over his face that is too organic to ever hide his expression.

He picks you up gently, flies slow enough that you want to get mad, you want to pick another fight at five hundred feet and get it over with. You can see his expression but find it hard to read, and you want to know what he’s thinking. You want to just hear it all now instead of later, or just--spend the rest of your life filling in the blanks.

It’s still hard enough to breathe, though. He slows down and stares at you when you move against his grip, finding the other breather on your belt and pulling it on. “You should go to the hospital,” he yells, but you shake your head, leaning it against his shoulder. No hospitals, never like this. Never when you’re already this ashamed. He calls you a pendejo again, but aims for the tower. Maybe that’s all he’s thinking. Maybe Cassie is right, and nothing else has to change.

-

When it’s over, when you wake up, Jaime is still by your bed in the infirmary, the scarab tracking your vitals and his voice mixing with Cassie’s as they keep each other, and you, company. Jaime hands you your belt when prompted, no more argument than can be contained in a sidelong stare, and your hands slide together over it, warm skin to your still-cool. You unpack the canisters on the blanket over your legs, just a quick and soothing inventory that doesn’t involve how many stitches he helped you sew, how many bruises you’re going to have and how long you’re going to be in this bed. Most of what you’re missing makes sense--flash bombs, breathers, birdarangs--until you get to the pouch where you keep your father’s coins, always at your hip, always there in case of _something_.

It’s empty.

Cassie notices the change in your stillness first, reaching her hand through the pile to take yours. “Tim, what’s wrong?”

Looking up at her, then Jaime, you let the silence drag until Jaime’s smile is more of a grimace, like he doesn’t know what else to do. With a squeeze, you drop Cassie’s hand to bump your fist against his arm, trying to tell him something, include him, without actually taking his hand in your own. His smile twists, not really getting it, but it’s a lot less pained. “Nothing,” you say.

You think it’s finally going to be alright.


End file.
